Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Understanding the relationships between the scale of population levels, food production, and emerging social inequality has long been a central focus in archaeology and anthropology. Often based on surface distribution of cultural materials, or mortuary analysis, researchers have advanced relatively high population estimates. While there are exceptions, these are often based more on intuition and less on detailed comparative analysis or statistical methods. Be it focused on Woodland mounds of the eastern North America, Pueblos of the American Southwest, or Neolithic villages of the Near East, or a host of other case studies, some of these estimates have become enshrined in archaeological literature and the minds of the general public. In this session presenters reengage with how we reconstruct population levels within a settlement, how we estimate regional population change, and what methods are best employed to estimate how many people lived at a settlement. Beyond thinking about methods for demographic reconstruction, and the extent to which researchers are over estimating past population levels, the presenters in this session will reconsider a range of perspectives on how population growth and pressure may have served as drivers of short-term decision making and long-term evolutionary change.
Other Keywords
demography •
population estimates •
Settlement patterns •
Bronze Age •
Architecture •
History •
Lithics •
Mortuary Analysis •
Dating Techniques •
Cultural Heritage
Geographic Keywords
Georgia (Country) •
Russian Federation (Country) •
Europe (Continent) •
Republic of Turkey (Country) •
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Country) •
Republic of Iraq (Country) •
Islamic Republic of Iran (Country) •
State of Israel (Country) •
Lebanese Republic (Country) •
Syrian Arab Republic (Country)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)
- Documents (8)
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Artifact Density and Population Density in Bronze Age China (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A common method of estimating population is to multiply a settlement area by an occupational density. Empirical studies show that occupational density generally increases with settlement size but estimating occupational density when structural remains are not...
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Demographic Modeling Using the Mortuary Record (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human remains are the most direct line of archaeological evidence of people in the past. The mortuary record, however, is the product of the complex interplay between social practices and taphonomic processes. To understand its formation and consequences for...
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Demography and Social Organization of the Cucuteni-Tripolye Populations: An Evolutionary Perspective (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper addresses the broad issue of population estimates as proxies and drivers of the evolution of social structures taking the example of the Cucuteni-Tripolye cultural complex (CTCC) covering a territory from the Eastern Carpathians to the Dnieper region...
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Demography, Heritage, and Archaeology: A View from Australia (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents a cautionary case study in heritage and archaeology from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, which is undergoing a rapid transformation due to an unprecedented program of urban and regional development. Following the author’s previous work in...
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Fine-Grained Estimation of House Populations in North America’s Pacific Northwest: Implications for Understanding Socio-demographic Change (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists benefit from theoretical modeling in demographic ecology. Models generated by Bruce Winterhalder, Cedric Puleston, and colleagues provide us with precise predictions as to conditions favoring population growth, stability, decline, and associated...
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How Many People Lived in the World’s Earliest Villages? Reconsidering Community Size and Population Pressure at Neolithic Çatalhöyük (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some researchers hold that Near East Neolithic agricultural villages were composed of thousands of people and that these villages existed as an evolutionary starting point on the path to rapid population growth and urbanism. Revaluating the settlement of...
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How Many People Occupied 25BD1 at AD 1300 (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lynch site (25BD1) is an 80 ha thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Plains Village site on Ponca Creek in northeastern Nebraska occupied by ancestors of the modern Pawnee and Arikara nations. Radiocarbon dates on material from past and recent excavations...
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Peopling the Paleolithic: Demographic Approaches to Earliest Prehistory (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With its sparse and often fragmentary human fossil record, comparatively limited range of material culture, and almost total absence of structural evidence, reconstructing local and regional population levels in the Paleolithic is especially difficult. Focusing...